Originally Posted by
neilmpenny
From the book 'Citizen Hughes'
There were dangers everywhere, and he was so vulnerable. The world was dealing with a facade. The real Howard Hughes lay hidden in a self-made prison, a naked old man in terrible pain and terminal terror, living like an inmate in the back ward of a mental institution, looking like a corpse laid out on a slab in the city morgue.
He was a figure of gothic horror, something ready for or just risen from the grave. Emaciated, practically skeletal with only 120 pounds stretched out over his six-foot-four-inch frame, and hardly a speck of colour about him anywhere, not even his lips, he seemed not merely dead but already in decay. Only the long grey hair that trailed half way down his back, the thin scraggly beard that reached midway onto his sunken chest, and the hideously long nails that extended several inches in grotesque yellowed corkscrews from his fingers and toes seemed to be growing, still showing signs of life. That, and his eyes. Sometimes they looked dead, blank. But other times they gleamed from their deep sunk sockets with surprising, almost frightening intensity, fixed in a hard, searching, penetrating stair. Often, however, they seemed to stare in, not out.
Hughes was in pain. Physical pain. Mental pain. Deep, unrelenting pain. Many of his teeth were rotting black stumps, some just dangling loose from his puffy, whitened, pus-filled gums. A tumor was beginning to emerge from the side of his head, a reddened lump protruding through the sparse strands of gray hair. He had bedsores festering all down his back, some so severe that eventually one shoulder blade-the bare bone-would poke through his parchment like skin. And then there were the heedle marks. The telltale tracks ran the full length of both his thin arms, scarred his thighs, and clustered horribly around his groin.
Howard Hughes was an addict. A billionaire junkie. He was shooting up massive amounts if codeine, routinely "skin-popping" more than twenty grains daily, sometimes three or four times that much, regularly taking doses thought lethal. He had been hooked for two decades, ever since a 1946 plane crash, when his doctor prescribed morphine to ease the pain of what everyone thought would be his final hours. As he instead recovered, the doctors substituted codeine, and through the years Hughes demanded even-larger doses, finally setting up a byzantine illegal supply operation, getting prescriptions filled under assumed names at various Los Angeles drug stores.
Often now he would wake in the terrors of withdrawal and begin his day by reaching down to the black metal box by his bedside where he kept his stash and his unsterilized hypodermic needle. Immediately mixing a fix, he would dissolve several white tablets in his pure bottled Poland Spring water, then jab the spike into his wasted body. Sometimes he prolonged the ritual by "double-pumping," injecting half the white fluid, then drawing it back up into the syringe with his blood, letting the needle dangle for a moment before he shot the full load back into his system. Then he would relax, and in the first warm flush of relief and satisfaction now and then softly sing a little jingle to himself, a little scat bebop routine he remembered from the old days. "Hey-bop-a-ree-bop. Hey-bop-a-ree-bop." And finally maybe a quiet chuckle.
There were other drugs, and the codeine was not the worst of them. Hughes was also gobbling massive quantities of tranquilizers, up to two hundred milligrams of Valium and Librium at a single shot, ten times the normal dose. Blue bombers. And when he wasn't shooting codeine, he was swallowing fistfuls of Empirin #4, a prescription compound containing codeine, aspirin, caffeine, and a synthetic pain-killer called phenacetin. It was not the codeine but the phenacetin that was doing the real damage, ravaging his already shrunken kidneys. Eventually it would kill him.